We are delighted to announce that TEDxMidTownNY has found a permanent home at the newly renovated Hotel Beacon NYC, right next to the marvelous Beacon Theater on Broadway at 75th St.

Our headline speaker 8 March is Tom Shelley, President of Space Adventures, Ltd., the only company providing human space missions to the world marketplace. He will provide an “Overview of the Human Spaceflight Training Market”. Tom will share his insights and discuss developments in commercial space transportation and other related industries.
Space Adventures, the company that organized the flights for the world’s first private space explorers, is headquartered in Vienna, Va. with an office in Moscow. It offers a variety of programs such as the availability today for spaceflight missions to the International Space Station and around the moon, Zero-Gravity flights, cosmonaut training, spaceflight qualification programs and reservations on future suborbital spacecrafts. The company’s advisory board includes Apollo 11 moonwalker Buzz Aldrin, Shuttle astronauts Sam Durrance, Tom Jones, Byron Lichtenberg, Norm Thagard, Kathy Thornton, Pierre Thuot, Charles Walker, Skylab/Shuttle astronaut Owen Garriott and Russian cosmonaut Yuri Usachev.

Please Welcome: Noah Zerkin, Research Engineer – Neurology Department at the Human Aerospace Lab at Mount Sinai Medical Center. Noah designs and fabricates prototype sensor modules for automated mobile neurovestibular evaluation of human subjects using research-grade motion capture equipment. Noah is part of an international team that has implemented a full-motion flight and driving simulator system for evaluation of subjects who have spent extended periods in microgravity (i.e. at the International Space Station), and that has validated a vestibular stimulation device used to induce a state analagous to that caused by prolonged exposure to microgravity. He is helping build a data-rich neurophysiological research and evaluation environment supporting the implementation of compact and inexpensive devices for mobile self-evaluation.

Noah is also the inventor and developer of the Zerkin Glove, a low cost glove for interacting with virtual objects in an augmented environment, and the author of Augmentation featuring his views on the coming AR revolution.

The post-presentation discussion with the audience and these two speakers should be particularly interesting as Tom’s company has flown 7 private astronauts to the ISS over the past 10 years (including Anousheh Ansari who spoke at our September 2010 premier), while Noah is studying the effects on people of living in microgravity conditions such as are found on the ISS.

Videos: Cynthia Breazealdreams up and builds robots that teach, learn — and play. Watch for amazing demo footage of a new interactive game for kids.

Each TEDxMidTownNY program will feature 2 live speakers, and 2 presentations from http://www.TED.com, followed by discussion and networking.

TEDxMidTownNY takes place about 6 times a year at the Hotel Beacon NYC and is sponsored by the Space Frontier Foundation.

Reservations are encouraged. Advance tickets are available now: http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/158907. Tickets go on sale at the door beginning at 6:00pm the evening of the event. Tickets are $20 general admission and $5 for students with i.d. Seating is on a first-come, first-served basis.

PAST EVENTS

Wednesday 12 January 2011

Headline speaker: best-selling author Howard Bloom, whose enthralling books intertwine science, spirituality, economics, and social evolution. He is a leading activist for the development and implementation of Space Solar Power. “Howard Bloom personifies America’s entrepreneurial genius; following him will lead us to a new world of wealth creation.”. -Rich Kirby, President, Kepl…er Space University

“Bloom…tries to see the whole picture from the origin of the universe through the origin of life to the origins of humanity and the continuity of the creativity of the cosmos in our personal and social behavior. His insights along the way are mind-churning…” says Robin Fox, founder of the Anthropology Department at Rutgers University, former director of research for the H. F. Guggenheim Foundation.

“Howard Bloom’s books are a gift to civilization. The Genius of the Beast is the best business history I’ve read, and I’ve read many.” -Alex Lightman, author of Brave New Unwired World: The Digital Big Bang and the Infinite Internet.

Welcome:Ted Southern is a sculptor, costume maker, and inventor from Brooklyn, New York. For the last 4 years, Ted has been developing a new generation of space suit gloves, in coordination with Nikolay Moiseev, a Russian spacesuit fabricator. In November 2009, Ted and Nik outperformed NASA’s current Phase VI spacesuit gloves, and won second place in NASA’s Astronaut Glove Challenge. While at Eyebeam, Ted will be digitally developing the complicated patterns for these gloves, including pressure restraints and the Thermal Micrometeoroid Garment, and modeling hard and soft patterns for a new, complete low cost pressure suit.

The Space Frontier Foundation has helped produce Yuri’s Night NY, a space-themed party featuring speakers and live performances, since 2008. TimeOut New York featured our party in print 7 April 2010 and online: